done anything at all.
Jandi reached out and gently tapped one half of the plate. Disturbed, it jiggled, the crack widening into reality, no longer watertight. Bright orange juice dribbled onto the table.
Heedless of the mess, dumping food onto his tabletop, he picked up the plate and critically examined the cut.
“Don’t touch it,” she warned. “It could be sharp.” The molecular edge of her knife made even ordinary objects dangerous.
He dragged a napkin across the edge. The cloth fell in two pieces. But when he repeated the experiment, nothing happened.
“I’m afraid I’ve just polished my atomic evidence out of existence.” Picking up the other half of the plate, he did the same. “Let me get you another plate, dear. Don’t bother to clean it up, just move to a new chair.” The table was large enough to seat a dozen people. “Remarkable,” he said, when he came back from the kitchen with a clean plate. “All those years I wasted flying around in space to find alien artifacts, and the only one I’ll ever see walks through my front door.”
“It’s not alien,” she said defensively. “I got it from my mother.”
“Did she say where she obtained it?”
Prudence bit her lip. “I never met her. She died when I was an infant.”
“May I?” he asked. Prudence put the medallion in his open palm. “Can you show me?”
She touched it delicately, with one finger. “Here, here, and here. Not anywhere else. It’s very hard to do, though.”
Jandi fumbled with the medallion for a moment, and then the blade slid out. Prudence caught her breath in surprise.
“A misspent youth,” he grinned. “I used to hustle vid games in bars, when I was a boy. I’ve kept up the dexterity through constant practice. On the odd chance I could win a bet, or impress a pretty girl. But I agree: it is not alien. It is too perfectly designed for the human hand. So somewhere out there a world is making nanotech pocket knives. And your mother…?”
“I don’t know. My father was a baker. He never went more than fifty kilometers from the apartment block he was born in. She was a traveler…”
She had been a spacer, a wanderer, a free spirit that flitted unanchored through the galaxy, working her passage on an endless succession of stray freighters and liners. Something about Prudence’s father had caught her, and she had fallen for the last time into the gravity well of a planet, to bud and seed like a tumbleweed taken to root.
Within a year she was dead.
Prudence had been the only thing her father had left of his beautiful star-crossed bride. He had married again, because that is what people do. He had loved his new wife, and the children they made; he had been a dutiful husband, a loving father, a good man. He had built a normal life. When he tried to tell Prudence the stories her mother had told him, the places she had been and the sights she had seen, it was as if he was relating a fairy tale that he had read in a book. Only when he had shown her the medallion had it become real to her. Only then had she seen the memory of grief in his eyes.
A few stories, a medallion, and the legal status as half off-worlder were all the inheritance he could pass on to Prudence. The thing she envied the most, the time that he had spent with that wonderfully exotic person, could never be shared.
When his homeworld of Strattenburg had burst into self-immolation, Prudence had fled in helpless despair. Only her status as half off-worlder had let her escape the clutches of a mad bureaucracy. Only the invisible beacon of her mother’s world had given her direction, kept her moving on an uncharted course instead of drifting aimlessly.
“You found Baharain, from a sliver of glass. Can you find her world from this?” Prudence didn’t dare hope, but she had to ask.
“No,” Jandi said. He put a data cube on the table. “I was going to trade you this, for your sliver. It is a copy of the university’s star compendium; every fact, observation, and rumor we’ve collected over the last hundred years. To buy it would cost a fortune, and undoubtedly break a law in the process. So I thought it would be a fair trade, but now I am in your debt again. The most I can tell you is that nothing vaguely like your artifact is described in that cube. I cannot guess how the medallion came to you, yet no other technology followed.”
Prudence had thought long and hard on the problem. “Maybe a node failed. Maybe we’re cut off now, the
Jandi shook his head sadly. “There are a thousand maybes, Prudence. War, disease, stellar collapse, or even aliens could have nipped this flowering in the bud. Or maybe they just don’t care. Maybe the gods are jealous. Prometheus is still bound to his rock; perhaps no other chose to join him.”
“I thought Hercules set him free.”
A twinkle of dark humor in Jandi’s eyes. “You believe in heroes? But of course. You are full of hope, as the young should be. Even a tired old man like myself can look at the edge of your knife and see possibilities. Take this cube, Prudence, and continue your quest. I lay only this charge upon you. When you find another university that has not heard of Altair, share the contents of the cube with them, even if they refuse to share theirs with you. We academics have learned to overlook petty stumbles in the march of knowledge. When you’re so far away from here you can’t gain any profit from it, then give it away, as I gave it to you.”
Prudence probably couldn’t gain any profit from it now. She already had a database of the local stars, and it was undoubtedly more up-to-date on current commercial issues. Kassa’s sudden change in buying patterns, for example.
But for a person intent on traveling beyond common knowledge, it might be of considerable value.
“Thank you,” she said. “I will.”
“If you can bear it,” he added softly, “you might update the entry on Strattenburg. We chose not to slander based on rumors. But you know the truth.”
She would have to think before she made that promise. Carrying his data cube like pollen to a distant flower was one thing. Bleeding her heart into it to make it richer was something else.
“I’m going to update the entry on Baharain first. By going there.”
“I advise differently, my dear. I advise you to run without looking back. You cannot materially affect the collapse of this world, and why should you try? Your fate does not lie with us, child. We strangers cannot ask this of you.”
Coming from a man who had just announced his intention to commit state-sponsored suicide, this paean to self-interest was unconvincing.
“It’s what I must do,” she parroted at him. “For my own sake, Jandi. I can’t flee without at least trying to help.”
He sighed. “You should. You would serve us better as a pollinating bee, not a warring wasp. One sting more or less will not matter to the bear who raids our honeyed chambers. At least promise me you won’t surrender completely to vainglory, to the point of thinking your
More lies. It was obvious that Jandi would have picked a fight with the League at any age. Courage was as integral to his character as the sharp eyes and deft fingers.
But would he have endangered a wife and children? Would he have stood up to the authorities if he had a family that depended on him, children who needed him, innocents they could threaten with destruction?
There was a reason the heroes of legend were never married. There was a reason so many people on Altair stood by silently and did nothing. It was the same reason that so many on Strattenburg had done nothing, until it was too late. Only the people without attachments could afford to risk everything. And if they weren’t attached to the world, why would they care what happened in it? Prudence had kept herself free of attachments since the day Strattenburg had burned them all. Or tried to; people kept creeping inside her defenses, like Jorgun and Jelly and Kyle and now Jandi. She had been running away out of self-protection, but now she found herself too detached to fear and too attached to flee.
